


tenacity

by TouchTheExoplanets



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Aperture Laboratories - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-05-31 15:05:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19428442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TouchTheExoplanets/pseuds/TouchTheExoplanets
Summary: Subject Name: Chell [surname redacted]Outlier ReportIntelligence: 71st percentileAthleticism: 45th percentileCreativity: 58th percentileTenacity: 99th percentileRejectedDO NOT TESTProctor's Note: Subject is abnormally stubborn. She never gives up. Ever.





	tenacity

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from Portal 2: Lab Rat, a webcomic that you can read for free online. It's canon. I highly recommend it. I've had the last panel as the lock screen on my phone for a year now.

It’s been  
so long.

Chell lifts her face.

She’d forgotten about the sun. How could she have forgotten about the sun? Aperture was always cold, always dark - but out here, out where the air smells like dust and warmth instead of metal and disinfectant, the sun bakes her skin and burns her retinas. It hurts, almost, but she doesn’t care.

She turns around to look for the camera, only to remember that there are no cameras out here. She’s not being watched. There will be no consequences if she tries to destroy the Weighted Companion Cube. There will be no punishments if she takes off her Long Fall Boots and walks barefoot in the wheat.

She can’t bring herself to do either of those things.

She’s not convinced that this isn’t an elaborate scheme to continue her testing.

But the _sun._ Of all the hellish tests GLaDOS threw at her, She could never make a sun. Oh, She tried; GLaDOS tried everything to convince Chell that she was free. But she always knew she wasn’t. She couldn’t remember what the sun felt like, but she knew that she would know when it was real.

She knows now.

An insect buzzes in her ear. It sounds a little too much like GLaDOS’s buzzer. She hits it. She looks down at her palm. There is no sign of an insect.

She tightens her grip on the companion cube and sets off for the horizon.

It’s not long before her fingers, unused to the handling such a bulky item, cramp around the cube. She unties the sleeves of her jumpsuit from around her waist and fashions them into straps. The cube is not heavy, she finds, once it is on her back. It’s unwieldy and useless, but it’s perfectly balanced. It doesn’t bother her. She keeps walking.

She doesn’t once consider leaving it behind.

_This Weighted Companion Cube will accompany you through the test chamber. Please take care of it._

Her feet begin to sweat in the boots. She’s used to sweat as a faint dampness on her chest or under her arms, a dampness that quickly turned into a chill in Aperture’s subterranean temperatures. She’s not used to this, a slippery stickiness that makes her feet slide forward, cramming her toes against the front of the boots.

She could take off the boots, but the wheat is stiff when it brushes against her arms, and she thinks it will cut her bare feet. She tries to just keep walking, but her toes hurt, and she knows from experience that ignoring pain makes it worse, not better. No test was ever solved by ignoring it.

She ends up ripping strips from her shirt and stuffing them into the boots. Instead of staying beneath the soles of her feet like she intends, they tend to bunch up in the front of her boots. She has to stop every five hundred paces to fix them. But they absorb the sweat and cushion her toes, so they will do.

She walks on.

_You haven’t escaped, you know._

_You’re not even going the right way._

Even though she knows, theoretically, that night exists, she still begins to panic when the sun disappears. The burning heat is gone. Exhaustion has begun to tug at her limbs, but she doesn’t dare stop to close her eyes.

She walks faster.

Her sweat is gone, and it should be a good thing, except the temperature feels just like a testing chamber. Right down to the cool metal against her back.

She raises her eyes to the sky and scans wildly for any sign of the sun. She freezes.

The sky is black, blacker than any color black she ever saw in Aperture, and dotted with tiny white specks. There’s no sun, but there’s a perfect sphere that glows, almost like a fluorescent except gentler.

It takes her a second to find the word. _Moon._ The moon is out. And so are the stars.

Is the moon a star? She seems to remember that it is. Or maybe it was the sun that was a star. But those specks are white, and the sun is yellow. Yellow like Her optic.

Chell shudders and walks on.

_The symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center testing are superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and hallucinations._

It’s days before she sees anything but wheat in every direction. She spots a smudge on the horizon and walks towards it. It gets bigger with every step, dividing into trees, houses, broken-down fences. The ground under her feet steadily changes from stalks of broken wheat to worn dirt road. She shifts the weight of the companion cube on her back and wishes that she had the portal device.

**Don’t take the road.**

It doesn’t feel safe, taking the main road directly into what must be a town. She learned long ago to listen to those kinds of feelings, so she moves off the path and heads for the line of trees off to her right. The heat of the sun is kinder when filtered through leaves, and her steps are softer on a bed of golden pine needles. She uses the forest to hide her as she approaches the town, but at last she has to leave her cover. She creeps out from behind a tree and slips through a gap in the fence. Her jumpsuit catches on an exposed bit of metal and she stops short before it can tear, carefully easing it off of the spike. The last thing she needs is for one of her very few resources to become damaged.

She weaves between houses as she heads for the center of the town. It’s dead quiet, except for the faint wind blowing across the wheat and the creaking of the old wood houses. Most of the buildings wouldn’t shelter anything now. Some of them have simply fallen into disrepair; some have holes blown in their walls and roofs from some weapon that Chell doesn’t want to meet. She considers entering them to search for food or water. Her tongue has been dry for days.

**Don’t go in there.**

She dismisses the idea. She knows when materials won’t hold her weight. It was an essential skill when she was trapped deep in the bowels of Aperture. She won’t risk falling into some lower floor and trapping herself. She has no portal device to save her now.

She keeps heading for the center of town.

The first thing she notices when the buildings open up into what appears to be some sort of town square is the well placed precisely in the center.

The precision of its placement makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. It’s almost as if it were placed by a sadistic artificial intelligence, masquerading as an old human settlement.

**Don’t go to the well.**

Chell needs water. She knows enough about her own biology to know that the fact she hasn’t urinated in dozens of hours is a bad sign. She’s been pushing past her swimming head and weakening limbs, but she can’t for much longer.

**Don’t do it!**

She can’t afford to hope that she’ll find another source of water, no matter how completely exposed she will be in the center of the square.

Still in the shelter of a house, she unties the sleeves of her jumpsuit from around her neck and lowers the companion cube to the ground. If she finds danger in the center of the square, she can’t afford to be weighed down. She reties the jumpsuit sleeves around her waist.

If she finds danger in the center of the square, she will run, and she will not go back for the companion cube. She will leave it behind.

**Don’t leave me.**

She will leave it.

**Please. I can’t be alone.**

It’s just a cube.

_The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube cannot speak._

Chell scans the edges of the square. She sees nothing. Hears nothing. She has every reason to believe that she’s alone, except her intuition—her sixth sense, without which she never would have survived Aperture—is buzzing wildly.

She wishes she had the portal device. Not that it would be any use; there aren’t any white-painted surfaces here. She just always felt safer with it in her hands.

She takes a step out from behind the corner of the house.

She still sees nothing.

Her intuition rises from a buzz to a screech. She tries to pinpoint the danger, but unlike in the testing chambers when her intuition would scream RUN or HIDE, all it seems to be doing now is panicking. It’s not very useful.

Chell steels herself, knuckles down on her terror, and walks towards the well.

In retrospect, she will be able to pinpoint the exact moment she senses everything go wrong. Twenty paces from the shelter of the house, twenty paces from the shelter of the well, caught dead in no-man’s land, her intuition switches from wordless screeching to one single, absolute command.

**_DUCK._ **

She hits the dirt hard, scraping her jaw on a rock embedded in the ground, painfully jarring her sweaty, sore body. Bullets tear through the air above her head. In the space of about a nanosecond, Chell processes that she has absolutely no time, that she has to move, and that she won’t make it. She rises to one knee, braces one long-fall boot against the ground, and uses it to fling herself forward to the relative safety of the well.

She almost makes it.

The bullets strike her twice—once in the thigh and once in the side. She hits the ground and rolls behind the well, not that it matters, really, when her life is pouring out through the holes in her skin. _Shit._

She tries to apply pressure. Can’t decide where to put her hands. Settles for her side. Hopes the bullet in her leg didn’t nick the femoral artery. Tries to decide what to do through the haze settling over her brain.

The sound of gunfire has stopped. Chell hears _target-lost are-you-still-there_ and doesn’t know whether the sound is real. Doesn’t know whether anything is real. Waits for Her to gloat. Hears nothing.

She still needs water.

That, at least, is an achievable goal. She sits up, or tries to. Finally succeeds in propping herself up on her elbows. Gets her knees under her. Ignores the slick crimson liquid turning the dirt into mud. Stares helplessly into the well. No water. Bone dry.

All that. For this. Just this.

Chell collapses onto her back. The color of the sky reminds her of something else. Another blue that once seemed like a kindness, but ended up a cruelty, like everything else down there.

She closes her eyes.

She survived all that to get out here, and she didn’t even last a week.

_You’ve been wrong about every single thing you've ever done, including this thing._

Chell feels sparks of an ancient fury. She did not survive all that for this. She did not survive Her for this. She did not fall, fight, and _test_ for _this_. She did not stretch her mind in ways she didn’t think possible, she did not _strategize_ and _solve_ and _innovate_ —

_You’re not smart. You’re not a scientist. You’re not a doctor. You’re not even a full-time employee. Where did your life go so wrong?_

All she’s ever done is keep moving.

_Stop squirming and die like an adult._

Chell opens her eyes and she begins to think.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no clue if this is going into turn into a longer story. This is where it ends, for now, but if I figure out how to flesh out this idea, I will. As always, comments make me a better writer!
> 
> Exo


End file.
